Caille Millner: We were real Americans all along, and we're back

Something happened in the country last week, and it wasn't just history.
As thrilling, as validating, and as exciting as it was to watch America lurch one step closer to fulfilling its promise of becoming that place of John Winthrop's imagination -- that "city upon a hill," he called it, where "we must be knit together in this work as one man" -- the real transformation had, in a sense, already happened. It had happened before the polls closed and the votes were tallied and the country agreed to be led by Barack Obama. It happened because people like you and I decided that we would no longer accept the idea that we were not real Americans.
If you're a person of color, or an urbanite, then you have known what I'm talking about for a very long time. If you're relatively new to this -- if you're a member of a profession, say, or you have immigration in your recent family background, or you are (gasp!) a Muslim -- then you can catch my drift. All of us have been told that we were not real Americans. For years we believed it.
Didn't we? All that alienation, all that apathy. All that talk about moving to Canada. All that defensive crouching when we traveled abroad, or met people who live in other countries. And -- worst of all -- all those feelings of inadequacy when confronted by those who proclaimed themselves to be the "real" Americans. As if an "American" was a type -- a white heterosexual male who lived in a small town, judging by the rhetoric